1 – Installing Programmable Thermostats

According to the Stats, people in the U.S. use about 48% of all energy on heating and cooling their homes.

If you replace your old thermostats with new programmable thermostats, you can program it to stay at the optimum temperature automatically. If you buy a 5-1-1 or a 5-2 thermostat you can set the temperatures according to your workdays and weekends. This will help you bring down your home energy bill by about 50%.

2 – Fix the Leaks

Find all the leaks all over your home. You can also find all the places where the doors and windows don’t close properly, allowing for small leakages of air. Fixing this will bring down your energy bill.

You can also find any electric leaks that might be there due to old wiring. Find these and replace the wiring. You can also get an Energy Monitor. These are relatively inexpensive. You can recoup the cost in about six months. It will show you the amount of power being used.

3 – Replace old light bulbs with LED and CFL

If you take a 100 watt bulb that is incandescent and compare it with a CFL bulb you will see this fact:

A CFL costs about $2 more than the incandescent bulb but it saves you about $60 or more overall, during the length of use. And LEDs are about 80% more efficient than the incandescent bulb.

You can see the comparisons of all three here and see how much money you will save over the lifetime of the bulb: over 50,000 hours the total cost for an LED bulb is $ $85.75 vs $352.50 for an incandescent bulb.

4 – Insulate your house

Around $200 per year is lost because of poor insulation. You will need to spend about $2000 for this but you will recoup this in about 10 years time.

5 – Install energy efficient water heaters

You can use these or install Solar water heaters. Ideally you could change over to Solar energy for your whole home. This would cost about $32000, and would take about 10 years to recoup the cost. If completely changing your home over to Solar energy is too expensive, you can use Solar water heaters.

If you do any of these it will help bring down your carbon footprint. If you like this article, then please share this through Facebook and help your friends save energy too.